Unbiased homomorphic system and its application in reducing multiplicative noise

The problem of reducing the multiplicative noise corrupting a signal is discussed. A generalisation of the existing sampled function weighted order (SFWO) filter is proposed by relaxing the symmetry condition on the probability density function (PDF) of the noise. This generalised SFWO filter is then used within a homomorphic system to reduce the multiplicative noise. It is shown that the output from such a system is biased, and hence, a suitable bias compensation technique is suggested. An unbiased homomorphic system, whose design is based on the PDF of the corrupting multiplicative noise, is proposed to reduce the noise. Images generated by coherent imaging systems are always corrupted by speckle, a kind of multiplicative noise having a lognormal distribution. A filter called the mean median filter, to reduce additive white Gaussian noise, is first proposed and then used within the unbiased homomorphic system to reduce the speckle in images. The effectiveness of the various proposed algorithms is demonstrated and compared with that of some of the existing schemes through extensive simulations